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> But pragmatically, they likely don't answer the phone. Or email. > So, it is still easier to ... hold them responsible in court for damage/injury/deaths cau

> But pragmatically, they likely don't answer the phone. Or email. > So, it is still easier to ... hold them responsible in court for damage/injury/deaths caused by the actions their vehicles take which are not under control of the driver.

bumby 6y ago
I prefer proactive policy. As much as I would have liked to see more people go to jail for the 2009 financial crisis, for example, I’d prefer to see smarter regulation to have prevented it in the first place
- bluGill 6y ago
  Regulations are too complex to get right like that. You need to figure out how to enforce following the spirit of them not the letter or you will forever be seeing more crises that you didn't foresee.
  - bumby 6y ago
    I think that’s the ideal, but tends to break down in practice. The problem with expecting the spirit of the law to be the compass is that it opens up a lot for interpretation. The end result is that it incentivizes gamesmanship where the organization with the best lawyers win
- bigiain 6y ago
  While I agree - I reckon it's far past time that we pierce the outdated "corporate personhood" idea, and let Tesla/Uber/Apple/Waymo et al. know that society has chosen to hold their "corporate personhood" responsible in the same way people are held responsible. If your corporation (via it's self driving software) kills someone, the corporation will "go to jail", a C level exec does the jailtime and the entire company will be unable to carry on any of it's normal business for the duration of the sentence (while still being held responsible for it's obligations to staff/suppliers/cerditors). If that self driving software is judged to be liable for a traffic infringement, the corporation will pay an amount equal to the percentage of income that a human driver would have paid. If it's an infringement with a ~$400 fine, the corporation should pay ~0.5% of their annual income - the same sort of penalty as "an average salary" person. A couple of $20mil fines and a 6 month total company shutdown would be very "proactive" in encouraging Tesla to get Elon to shut the fuck up with his big bold claims that cannot be backed up. If Uber had been slapped with the "corporate personhood" equivalent of whatever penalty a human driver who'd killed that person crossing the road with a bicycle they'd be far more circumspect about using minimum wage contractors as "safety drivers" in their prototypes. (I can dream, right?)
  - YawningAngel 6y ago
    At a certain scale, it's inevitable that even a responsible company will screw something up. Shutting the company down when that happens is tantamount to banning companies above a certain size
    - bigiain 6y ago
      Taken to the extreme, what you're suggesting amounts to "large corporations should be allowed to kill people occasionally". I can see a wide spectrum between my (admittedly over punitive towards corporations) ideas and this (somewhat intentional misinterpreted) idea of yours. But I do honestly think Uber and Tesla have evaded morally deserved punishments by blaming customers or contract staff who were pretty much doing what everybody would expect to be able to do using the technology as described. "it's inevitable that even a responsible _person_ will screw something up" - but that doesn't mean we give them a zero consequence break if they kill or injure someone. (We do, however, distinguish between things like murder, manslaughter, and negligence-causing-death. And penalise differently, based at least partly on the ability of the punishment to discourage other people from doing similar things. Perhaps Uber was only guilty of negligence-causing-death for using minimum wage contractors as safety drivers. Perhaps Tesla was guilty of manslaughter by advertising as "autopilot" a thing that drives full speed into offramp dividers?)
      - bumby 6y ago
        We have already accepted this in other areas where low probability meets large applicability. We know probability is non-zero and given a large enough sample size there is an expected adverse outcome quite a bit higher than zero. E.g., a more trivial example is that the allowable number of insect parts in food is greater than zero because it’s impossible to mass produce food and never have contamination.
    - rtx 6y ago
      We shut down Boeing. As per your argument their planes should still be flying.

bumby 6y ago

I prefer proactive policy. As much as I would have liked to see more people go to jail for the 2009 financial crisis, for example, I’d prefer to see smarter regulation to have prevented it in the first place

bluGill 6y ago
Regulations are too complex to get right like that. You need to figure out how to enforce following the spirit of them not the letter or you will forever be seeing more crises that you didn't foresee.
- bumby 6y ago
  I think that’s the ideal, but tends to break down in practice. The problem with expecting the spirit of the law to be the compass is that it opens up a lot for interpretation. The end result is that it incentivizes gamesmanship where the organization with the best lawyers win
bigiain 6y ago
While I agree - I reckon it's far past time that we pierce the outdated "corporate personhood" idea, and let Tesla/Uber/Apple/Waymo et al. know that society has chosen to hold their "corporate personhood" responsible in the same way people are held responsible. If your corporation (via it's self driving software) kills someone, the corporation will "go to jail", a C level exec does the jailtime and the entire company will be unable to carry on any of it's normal business for the duration of the sentence (while still being held responsible for it's obligations to staff/suppliers/cerditors). If that self driving software is judged to be liable for a traffic infringement, the corporation will pay an amount equal to the percentage of income that a human driver would have paid. If it's an infringement with a ~$400 fine, the corporation should pay ~0.5% of their annual income - the same sort of penalty as "an average salary" person. A couple of $20mil fines and a 6 month total company shutdown would be very "proactive" in encouraging Tesla to get Elon to shut the fuck up with his big bold claims that cannot be backed up. If Uber had been slapped with the "corporate personhood" equivalent of whatever penalty a human driver who'd killed that person crossing the road with a bicycle they'd be far more circumspect about using minimum wage contractors as "safety drivers" in their prototypes. (I can dream, right?)
- YawningAngel 6y ago
  At a certain scale, it's inevitable that even a responsible company will screw something up. Shutting the company down when that happens is tantamount to banning companies above a certain size
  - bigiain 6y ago
    Taken to the extreme, what you're suggesting amounts to "large corporations should be allowed to kill people occasionally". I can see a wide spectrum between my (admittedly over punitive towards corporations) ideas and this (somewhat intentional misinterpreted) idea of yours. But I do honestly think Uber and Tesla have evaded morally deserved punishments by blaming customers or contract staff who were pretty much doing what everybody would expect to be able to do using the technology as described. "it's inevitable that even a responsible _person_ will screw something up" - but that doesn't mean we give them a zero consequence break if they kill or injure someone. (We do, however, distinguish between things like murder, manslaughter, and negligence-causing-death. And penalise differently, based at least partly on the ability of the punishment to discourage other people from doing similar things. Perhaps Uber was only guilty of negligence-causing-death for using minimum wage contractors as safety drivers. Perhaps Tesla was guilty of manslaughter by advertising as "autopilot" a thing that drives full speed into offramp dividers?)
    - bumby 6y ago
      We have already accepted this in other areas where low probability meets large applicability. We know probability is non-zero and given a large enough sample size there is an expected adverse outcome quite a bit higher than zero. E.g., a more trivial example is that the allowable number of insect parts in food is greater than zero because it’s impossible to mass produce food and never have contamination.
  - rtx 6y ago
    We shut down Boeing. As per your argument their planes should still be flying.